"I would rather walk," she said, her husband having hailed a cab already
occupied by two city men.

The fixity of her mood was broken by the action of walking. The shooting
motor cars, more like spiders in the moon than terrestrial objects, the
thundering drays, the jingling hansoms, and little black broughams,
made her think of the world she lived in. Somewhere up there above the
pinnacles where the smoke rose in a pointed hill, her children were
now asking for her, and getting a soothing reply. As for the mass of
streets, squares, and public buildings which parted them, she only felt
at this moment how little London had done to make her love it, although
thirty of her forty years had been spent in a street. She knew how
to read the people who were passing her; there were the rich who were
running to and from each others' houses at this hour; there were the
bigoted workers driving in a straight line to their offices; there were
the poor who were unhappy and rightly malignant. Already, though there
was sunlight in the haze, tattered old men and women were nodding off
to sleep upon the seats. When one gave up seeing the beauty that clothed
things, this was the skeleton beneath.

A fine rain now made her still more dismal; vans with the odd names
of those engaged in odd industries--Sprules, Manufacturer of Saw-dust;
Grabb, to whom no piece of waste paper comes amiss--fell flat as a bad
joke; bold lovers, sheltered behind one cloak, seemed to her sordid,
past their passion; the flower women, a contented company, whose talk
is always worth hearing, were sodden hags; the red, yellow, and blue
flowers, whose heads were pressed together, would not blaze. Moreover,
her husband walking with a quick rhythmic stride, jerking his free hand
occasionally, was either a Viking or a stricken Nelson; the sea-gulls